Ate It Anyway

A Foolish but Lovable Airport

a foolish but lovableairport It is very satisfying to be part of a dialogue in which a man invites a woman whom he's already given up on to come visit him at his parents' summer house, at the very moment when that woman has aman in her apartment watching basketball and waiting for her to come back inside with the barbecued chicken legs. I leaned against the waist-high concrete wall that separates our twohalves of the shared balcony, cantilevered over the smoke of somebody else's hamburgers being grilled one floor below,and said you could stay there as long as you wanted. That's what we always saywhen weinvite someone out to be a houseguest, and we always make it clear that they will have their own room. 170 "Of course I will,"you said, asI waited for the implied comma and the neutralizing counterclause, and whentheydid not come, I wasnot sure what to do. It wasthe one dayof the year whenwhite fluff from some kind of tree blew in the air and collected in little transparent drifts against the curb.We both lookedup at an airplane that wasgoing over on its final approach to the airport two towns away,always the same aircraft, a homely,stubby little two-enginejet, this one painted up to look like Shamu, the Killer Whale.Then you went back to basting chickenlegs,yourback straight as a dancer's, the same easy slant over the grill, and I went inside my own kitchen, knowing that words pronounced in chicken smoke can neverbe wholly false or wholly true. In literary theory, a statement like that is considered mystification,but I'll stand behind it. So at least I was able to slide the glass door shut behind me and go back to being a professional kind of guy, with paperwork at the kitchen table and a head full of positive thoughts on behalf of the category of houseguests, at all cottages, those important strangers on whoseaccount we will hope for a good flight and good weather. I know how it feels to be resting from the trip, the long hum of a turboprop still vibrating in yourears, in a gingham-wallpapered room silent in the breeze through white curtains. That's a nice phrase. I should have said that, instead of just looking up into the air and wondering what cute themed livery (Star Wars, The Little Mermaid) the next aircraft coming over on finals would be painted in. But that too would be a problem. People who work together should not accidentallylivenext door to each other, because theywill end up unable to talk about anything but the airplanes that pass over,while one of them bends gracefully, straight-backed over the grill, using a soft-bristled brush to put red sauce on the chicken for the unseen person a foolish but lovable airport 171 who has come over to watch the basketball playersrun back and forth. Maybe I shouldn't have brought up the subject—though my experience with subjects has been that when you bring them up, it is exactly the same as not bringing them up. Maybeit's better just to think about it, about the word I love so much: bouseguest. A houseguest is a privileged character. He or she does not need to get a preparatory orange tan from one of those radiation chambers that my doctor calls melanoma mattresses. Youcan get off the plane white as a potato and nobody will care, and you will have free access to as many sun-protection factorsof sunblock as there is space for them under the sink in the guests' bathroom. A houseguest doesn't even have to be perfectly dressed. That idea is a big lie of cartoonists. One artist in particular that I keep seeingalmost every week sketches with fluent freehand lines sleek partygoers with oversizedwine glasses, guysin perfect suits with the jacket fabric rumpled at the inside bend of an elbow as evenly as the pleats of an accordion and the bulge of a Rolex somehow recognizable beneath the sleeve. Everybody's hair is drawn beautifully; even the pattern baldness of stocky young power lawyersis perfectly rendered, their side fringes crimped and layered in the artist's elegant pen-twirl, and one of them always makes a nonchalant remark, which usually I don't quite get, about how rich they all are. Allyou need to...